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And now, for something completely different: Do you worry about the polar bears, or are you just sick of forking it over to the oil mafia? Either way, relief is here for buyers caught between the now-plebian Toyota Prius and the small crop of expensive hybrid limos such as the Infiniti M35h.

Chevrolet’s Volt dips below our price ceiling, but only via government largesse. The $41,000 sticker slackens a jaw, but the feds are bribing buyers with a $7500 federal tax credit on the first 200,000 units sold, after which the program gradually phases out.

If you drive the Volt fewer than 40 miles a day and recharge at night, you may not ever hear the muted prattle of its 1.4-liter engine, which means you’re lugging around an extra 350 pounds or so of dead weight. And then there’s that huge, fake Chevy grille. Ugh.

However, if you happen to drive the Volt more than 40 miles and deplete the charge, you won’t be reduced to walking. Mileage always varies depending on use, but this car has galactic swings. The EPA got flustered trying to rate the Volt and eventually settled on an electric-only equivalent of 95 mpg city and 90 highway, along with gas numbers of 35 and 40, respectively. You may get 40 mpg; you may get 240 mpg.

The government doesn’t bribe you to buy a Lexus CT200h. The compact five-door hatchback hybrid is completely Euro-weird, and it fits exactly none of the known Lexus buyer profiles. A 1.8-liter engine does the pulling through a Prius-type two-motor hybrid transmission, earning a 43-mpg-city/40-mpg-highway label.

It’s billed as a luxury hybrid for drivers—and it certainly looks crouched and sporty—but with a combined 134 horsepower and a revised Corolla platform underneath, our low expectations for excitement were fulfilled. Even in sport mode, your fingernails will grow a half-inch during the quarter-mile.

We’d urge you to plug yourself into the Volt. Lord knows, it’s not gorgeous. And the cockpit’s tall, square screens and touch-sensitive buttons look like the designers locked themselves up with a Commodore PET, a Betamax, and the original Tron on loop.

But it’s not often that you get to park pioneering propulsion technology in your garage.